The benefits of recycling

Environmental benefits

The recycling industry is making a substantial contribution to the improvement of our environment by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, delivering significant energy and water savings, as well as conserving non-renewable virgin resources.

Some of the greatest environmental benefits of recycling are in the conservation of energy and natural resources and the prevention of pollution when recycled material, rather than raw material, is used to make a new product. Manufacturing materials the second time around is much cleaner and less energy intensive than when using raw materials.

Life cycle analysis (LCA)* modelling has shown that by substituting secondary-use materials for virgin materials the environmental benefits from reprocessing all material recovered in 2008-09 would be equivalent to:

• Victoria saving more than 75 million gigajoules of energy
• preventing more than 3.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases being emitted into the atmosphere (equivalent to taking 588,000 cars off the road)
• saving 50,000 megalitres of water (enough to fill almost 20,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools).

Economic benefits

Victoria's reprocessing industry reported contributing more than $144 million to the state's economy during 2008-09 through capital investment and expenditure on research and development (R&D).

Level of capital investment and expenditure on R&D by Victoria's reprocessing industries, Victoria 2008-09

* RMIT University, Centre for Design, Life Cycle Impact Data for Resource Recovery from C&I and C&D Waste in Victoria, September 2005

Top | Last updated 07/10/2010